I finally got sick and tired of all my windows laptops breaking physically one way or another. First there was ThinkPad Edge, then there was the ultrathin Sony Vaio (bought just before Sony sold the business and discontinued the thing).
Developers, Linus Torvalds included, online seemed to agree that MacBooks are the best hardware on the market.
So bought one, and installed Windows 10 with Bootcamp. All was swell, until I decided to try the Beckhoff TwinCAT XAE environment for PLC (programmable logic) programming.
This is a guide for getting VT-x to actually be available for VMware and TwinCAT in a MacBook Pro. This does not always work, mind you. And it stops working the instant the laptop goes to sleep for the first time. Apparently this has been an issue for years. What’s taking so long, Apple? Seriously? Sheesh.
Step by step
The VT-x virtualization wasn’t enabled according to TwinCAT XAE environment. According to Intel’s tool, it was though.
Also according to Apple’s command line tool on OS X it was there (instructions).
Mac:~ user$ sysctl -a | grep machdep.cpu.features
kern.exec: unknown type returned
machdep.cpu.features: FPU VME DE PSE TSC MSR PAE MCE CX8 APIC SEP MTRR PGE MCA CMOV PAT CLFSH DS ACPI MMX FXSR SSE SSE2 SS HTT TM SSE3 MON VMX EST TM2 TPR PDCM
- Computer Says No: After selecting Activate Configuration under TWINCAT menu, TwinCAT responds to trying to start up PLC program in XAE/Visual studio 2013
- Computer Says No, I mean 1018, so it IS there but just disabled…!
- Computer, eh, VMWare says no
- Computer, eh, VMWare says no
Ok, so maybe it is just disabled. How to enable it then?
After this, I was supposed to turn on OS X (which required me to press Alt key on startup since I had Windows setup as default for Boot Camp), and then from Finder menu boot to Windows. I did that, started up XAE, and magic! …. it didn’t work. But there was A DIFFERENT cryptical error message.
Ok, so I
- pressed start key,
- typed cmd,
- pressed the command prompt item that appeared with two fingers (on macbook that’s a right click, you know),
- selected Run as Administrator,
- cd’d to that path c:\TwinCAT\3.1\System,
- executed that BAT win8settick.bat file, it took a while to complete.
And rebooted.
Started up XAE again, Activated Configuration, and now COMPUTER SAYS YES! I am happy now.
Hello Olli! How did it go with this project?
Currently I’m a final year student of Automation and we use often TwinCAT for PLC programming. Since the first year I bought some cheap Windows laptop solely for this propose, I use my MacBook Pro for everything else and have been a mac user for about 10 years. So I’m quite used to the environment. If this worked, I could give a try because at least the time I tried there were some problems with virtualisation.
Thanks for the post!
Happy to hear this Mauricio! I currently don’t work with automation actively. However, this did work at the time.